Session
MO.2.C || Transfer Towards Climate Neutrality – Scenarios, Options and Valuation

Authors
Garvens, Hans J.

Abstract
Climate Change Mitigation is high on the agenda. Beeing a scientific issues the last years, politics and industry have taken the challenge. Lots of funding and grants are available, engineers are looking into their toolboxes finding some old and many new solutions. We are right at the very start of the transfer towards climate neutrality. In the early stages of development many data are still lacking, so LCA might assisst to some extend, bit not as good as assessing mature industrial processes. Since it is all about future the uncertainty of our results are significant high. As the uncertainty of process data we cannot predict how fast we have to be. Nobody has data on how the earth’s ecosystems may react on constantly further increase of GHG in the atmosphere. Many develpoments focus to achieve GHG neutrality by 2050, others believe that is far to slow. On examples of green steel, synthetic fuels and other CCU applications we learnd, that renewable electricity is the key issue to all decarbonization or defossilization projects. No future materials processes can GHG-efficiently produce without sufficient build-up of renewable energy capacities including transportation capacities of that energy. The fast build-up of wind and solar power is even more important, than any material or energy carrier process development. By 2050 we (German Environment Agency) calculated a electricity demand of some 1600 TWh per year. However, we are proud to have reached 50% renewable energy in our electricity mix, already. But that values little, since the demand will steeply increase from about 500 TWh today. Related to the electricity demand of 2050 we did not reach more then 16% share of renewables today. A number, we cannot be proud of. In LCAs assisiting the transfer we should not account for green electricity certificates, if they are bought. Only if new capacities were build up for new electricity demands, decarbonization can be achieved.